Best practise for return stock differentiation and ATP Impact

[majusko]

Following requirement was raised. Stock (final products) is returned by customers for different reasons. Sometime it is because of damaged goods, goods before expiration date etc. What is the best way to distinguish between multiple types of returned goods? We were thinking about using Stock type but it seems the available options are limited and may not be sufficient for every scenario with returned goods.

In order to make it more complex once goods is received it can be re-sold again to specific customers but not to other group of customers. Is there any way how ensure that ATP in case of Sales order for certain customer checks the received stock while for other customers returned received stock is ignored?

Think about the requirements from perspective of a complex environment with 3 PL warehouse which is responsible for logistic operations.

Thank you in advance, for any advise or experience shared.

[JL23]

Why would you need to distinguish between multiple types of returned goods?

In general you just have 3 conditions for a stock: goods for all (unrestricted) good for a few, bad (blocked) . you could even have "any of the 3 condition for a material before it is even sold and returned?

Are you manage your materials in batches?

[majusko]

Materials are not batch managed. Requirement is that goods which is returned e.g. 1 month before end of expiration date can be sold to customer X or Y but can not be sold to other customers. Hence ATP check in Sales orders created for customer X or Y should consider this returned stock as available. While for SOs for any other customers returned stock should be ignored.

[JL23]

how could you imagine to manage quality or shelf life expiration dates of returns or even in general without using batches?

[majusko]

Juergen, for that I have no answer. What I see in the system is that they do not use batches. It could be that the 3PL Warehouse system uses batch evidence with SLED, but when it comes to data in SAP, this information is not available.

[Jelena]

In this case I suspect that 3PL is where you'd have to manage this. As Juergen correctly pointed out, without batch management SAP simply has no data to offer anything more granular. Unless you want to ABAP the heck out of this (which I would not recommend).

[JL23]

Without data maintained no system is able to fulfill your requirement.

without batches you cannot differentiate the stock to use programs to determine if a part of the stock can be sold to some others customers, you are just limited to humans who can go into the warehouse and look at an hopefully sufficient labeled stock making then decisions. SAP has nothing to look at. See my blog How old is my stock / from which vendor is my stock